Financial firms which can't handle money figures scare me.

A long time ago I thought I blogged about E*trade having 15 bugs in their account creation process, several of which were catch-22 scenarios that required someone to call customer service to get it resolved. For example, they don't give you the entire account number online for security reasons, but then later they ask you for the entire account number. You're supposed to get this from your paper documents... which don't exist for an online account. (Can't find the old blog entry for some reason)

Well after dealing with bugs in their process and random selected holds on payments from my E*trade account to my normal bank account, I gave up and closed my account with them. Left them behind.

Unfortunately my new employer uses E*trade to manage their ESPP program. So I'm going through the account setup, and guess what? Bugs.

Choose where you want to keep funds not invested -- there's two options here. There's a nice link to compare them. But... the link to compare them only gives details on one of the options. Well, the option itself is a link... which goes to the description of the other option.

And even better yet, the page says "Insured to $250,000". But the "Compare" page says "Insured to $1,250,000". And when I called in to get technical support on this, the representative couldn't tell me which was true.

Financial services firms that have consistently buggy software scare me. Financial firms which don't know which number in their system is accurate... I got no words for that.